Free Web NovelChapter 34: In That Direction
The figure descended slowly from the sky.
Jet black hair. A body wrapped in dark clothing moving in the wind, threads of dark and bright energy constantly weaving themselves into the fabric as she fell, intertwining and separating in patterns that had no fixed end point.
Ethereal was the word that came closest, but it wasn’t quite that either.
Morgan le Fey.
Ethan knew the legend.
Half-sister of Arthur Pendragon, the King of Camelot. She had begun somewhere near the center of the court, close to power, close to blood, and then the distance between what she was and what the court allowed her to be had done what that distance always did to certain kinds of people.
She had fallen into magic. Into the internal politics of a kingdom that couldn’t decide what to do with her. Into a hatred for her brother that had grown alongside everything else she was until the two things were no longer separable.
He watched her descend without moving.
"Hmm."
He stroked his chin as her skill list appeared in the air in front of him.
[Spell Caster: The ability to create a myriad of spells in battle in quick succession, including air bursts, flame circles, chains of mana....]
[Curse of Misfortune: When afflicted on an opponent, this causes the opponent to constantly face difficulty in battle lasting more than 5 minutes.... The longer the battle lasts, the worse the curse.]
[Dragon Dive: Morgana has an affinity with dragons and with this ability she is able to enter the mind of one and force it to submit. Warning: using this skill will leave her defenseless for the duration of its use.]
He looked at the evolution requirement again.
Bend the will of 15 Lesser Dragons and place them under her liege.
Then at Dragon Dive.
"Ahhh. I see."
The pieces assembled cleanly. The requirement wasn’t arbitrary. It was built around the skill. Dragon Dive was the method, the evolution was the destination, and the two had been designed to run together.
’Where am I going to find lesser dragons though?’
The thought landed with more weight than he let show.
He looked back at Savors.
The old man said nothing, standing a few paces back, watching Morgan complete her descent with an expression that was doing its best to remain neutral and not entirely succeeding.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Back in the complex.
Eight new individuals were brought through the gates and positioned in the middle of the yard.
Their eyes moved across the space in the way the eyes of new arrivals always did, taking in walls and doors and the faces of the people already occupying the space, doing the calculations that anyone did when they entered a situation that hadn’t been explained to them yet.
Initially, three rooms had been distributed among Hela’s group. Now the number of bodies in the compound had grown past what that arrangement could absorb.
Davos had a solution.
Whoever wanted a room could take one.
They only needed to go and get it.
The problem with that was the people who already held the rooms.
Hela had fought her way to the top of the tier 7 rankings by destroying summon after summon, her serpent consuming each one without visible effort, the count climbing until the Demi-humans stopped taking volunteers and began assigning opponents directly.
Psycho Fin had done something different and in some ways worse, playing with the blood of the summoners he fought on stage, a viciousness that had nothing functional behind it. It was simply what he was. The other two were not mild either.
The new arrivals looked at the rooms.
They looked at who was in them.
"Oh yes."
Davos added it after a brief pause, a smile settling on his face as he moved to a chair in the corner and sat down.
"If you don’t have a room by sunrise, you’ll go down the mountain and walk behind my beast until nightfall."
He said it pleasantly.
The yard went quiet for a second as the group came to a realization of what exactly this was.
During the night, the horde slept. Movement was minimal. The beasts settled into loose heaps around the turtle’s back and the surrounding ground, their patterns slow and predictable.
During the day they raged.
Going down into the middle of that without a tier capable of managing what lived in it wasn’t a punishment with a far side. It was a removal dressed up as an inconvenience. Davos was sitting in his chair with the expression of someone who had not made a mistake in word choice.
The new arrivals understood that.
"Kena."
One of them exhaled the name slowly, directed at one of the two summoners who had been brought in with the second batch.
"I’m sorry."
He reached into the air and a sword materialized in his grip.
They were from the same stronghold. Most of the people in this yard were. The siege had pulled from the same population and the caravan had sorted them together, which meant the faces across the yard were not strangers.
Some of them were people who had trained near each other, grown up near each other, recognized each other by name.
A fight between them was a broken thing regardless of who won.
"It’s fine."
The young man called Kena looked back at him, a small smile crossing his face that had nothing easy in it.
"We don’t know who will win yet."
He pulled out a sickle and walked to the center of the yard.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Far away from the horde.
Far from the caravan and the turtle and everything moving inside that controlled chaos in the wasteland.
A warship tore through the sky at a speed that pressed against the edges of what the vessel was built to sustain, its hull cutting through the air with the particular sound of something being driven harder than comfort allowed.
"The signal is weakening again."
The voice came from the helm.
"Move faster."
A woman sat at the front of the ship, her body wrapped in bandages from shoulder to jaw, one hand gripping a mirror so tightly the knuckles showed the strain of it. Her eyes were on the mirror’s surface.
The signal inside it pulsed.
Faint. Inconsistent. Cutting in and out in the pattern of something being disrupted rather than something that had simply stopped.
Losing to a Demi-human was one thing. A fight could go wrong. She understood that. She had lived long enough and fought enough battles to understand the arithmetic of how outcomes shifted. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
But that half-beast had taken her daughter.
When she caught up to him she would pull him apart.
If she couldn’t manage that, then the title she had held and built and bled for meant nothing.
High Regent.
Her grip on the mirror tightened.
The warship accelerated.
